The greatest pity about the recent dispute over the proposed e-voting scheme (which cost only the price of two hospitals, a medium-sized school, half of Leitrim, and all for nothing) was that it never touched upon the heart of our electoral problem.
This has nothing whatever to do with how our electoral machine works, and everything to with what it works for: the lunacy that is the multi-seat constituency, decided by proportional representation.
It's rubbish. Crap. Peruvian Pooh. And that it might reflect opinion marginally better doesn't mean it makes for better politics: the opposite is true. The availability of various preferences means that voters can be quite frivolous towards lower options, and feel free to indulge passing, irresponsible fads. Thus Donegal was able not so long ago to produce one TD who wanted Brits out, and another who wanted Brit TV for nothing, probably elected by the very same voters.
Multiple-seat constituencies corrupt multiply. The primary threat within a TD's constituency is usually not from an opposing party, but from a party colleague. Irish tribal voting habits mean there are only so many guaranteed votes for a party within any constituency: many Fine Gaelistas would prefer to bathe their eyes in vinegar than vote Fianna Fáil. The reverse, the same.
In a single-seat constituency, those bodies of votes would be sought by single candidates from each party. With the multi-seat constituency, each bloc of votes is fought over by candidates from the same party. The result - as we all know - is the disease of clientelist politics, in which politicians become social workers, tax consultants, medical card distributors, purveyors of planning permissions, nurses, doctors and babysitters, in order to court the voter.
Come Saturday afternoon, and the roofs of Ireland are festooned with TDs and their aspirant replacements also, their hands full of hammers, their mouths crammed with nails and their pockets full of tiles, as they try to keep the electorates happy.
Christmas morning, and not a soul stirs, except local politicians repairing roads, digging gardens, cleaning windows, and of course scrambling down chimneys to leave presents marked "Love from Santa Claus TD (wink wink)".
The multi-seat constituency is a vile and irreformable contaminant in Irish political life, reinforcing our traditional Tammany instinct for jobbery and favours. This doesn't mean, of course, that the British and American first-past-the-post system is better. It clearly isn't. President Bush was by no means the first national leader to be elected by a minority of voters. Winston Churchill was elected prime minister of Britain in 1951 with 48 per cent of the votes. Labour received 48.8 per cent of the vote, but won 26 fewer seats.
So clearly, a system which can produce a prime minister with nearly 1 per cent fewer votes than the opposition is bonkers - and also supplies a corrective to the modern myth that the British people always revered Churchill. As Tory leader he never won a plurality of votes in any general election, because the majority of the British people of the time, rightly, neither trusted nor respected him.
Yet it is also a bad system where politicians are judged not by their political ideas, or their principles, or their contribution to the intellectual life of the Dáil, but their ability to get hedges and old ladies' toenails clipped - though to be sure, Aunt Mildred's toenails do have their part in the greater scheme of things.
Of course, for those psephologists who specialise in the arcane wizardry of vote-transference, poll-time in MSPR is drool-time - the equivalent of a 20-year-old boy finding himself sharing a threesome with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
Indeed, the intoxicant of election time is a primary reason why the system remains; it gives a wondrous insight into popular conduct in the polling booth. (Why did those 400 votes for the Cannibalism and Nuclear Spillage Party transfer en masse to the Green Vegetarian Alliance?) Moreover, it provides a couple of days' serious national excitement every four years or so.
But elections are not studies in how people behave when people are given multiple options, sociologically fascinating though the outcome might be for such as Richard Sinnott. There are all sorts of opinion polls which can achieve a comparable, though admittedly more limited, insight. Cinemas and theatre are where we should be getting our excitement: elections are fought to provide neither, but instead to secure a representative and effective government, one which - ideally, at least - reflects the manifestos presented before the election.
As the recent debate on e-voting went from tepid to personalised napalm, Martin Cullen's manner suggested that he didn't think Disdain was something you find on your tie after eating soup. Nor - in his mien - is Arrogance part of the Normandy coastline. No, indeed not. He actually does disdainful and arrogant rather well, but happily - as it happens - on the question of the e-mail voting, rather unsuccessfully. Even he at his most dismissive couldn't sneer the present failings of e-voting into oblivion.
So, fifty-something million euros later, we are back to the mark-one pencil and the mark-one ballot paper - and also, the mark-one hand on which to count our blessings. A merciful providence has saved us from committing ourselves to an electronic voting system which would have locked us into retaining the unreformed, multi-seat constituencies.
The millions spent will not have been entirely squandered if they have given us time to come to our senses and ditch a worthless electoral system which corrupts, contaminates and complicates.